S · 06 / Residential & HOA Patrol

A neighborhood officer
your HOA board can
stand behind.

We build dedicated patrol programs for HOAs, gated communities, and neighborhood associations across Tennessee and Mississippi. Randomized cadence, a named officer your residents recognize, a documented incident log, and a monthly report your board can put in front of the assessment-paying members.

DisciplineS · 06 Residential
CadenceRandomized 4–8 passes / night
ReportMonthly · board photo log
Typical door ratio1 : ~150 standard
Contract12 mo · HOA signed by board
37
Communities served
Active HOA + neighborhood programs across TN + MS as of Q1 2026.
94%
Resident satisfaction
Median on annual board-administered resident survey, trailing 12 months.
99.6%
Log reliability
Incident logs filed within the 6-hour SLA — audited every month by dispatch.
91%
HOA retention
Three-year retention rate across our residential book — board turnover included.
01 / What It Solves

Four problems
every HOA
keeps raising.

A residential program is a general deterrent — but it has to solve real, named problems to justify the assessment. The four below show up on virtually every HOA board agenda in Germantown, Collierville, and Brentwood. Our program is built around them.

01

Non-resident access

Unfamiliar vehicles cruising after 11 PM. Door-to-door solicitors at dinner. Package-delivery pretexts on holiday weekends. Officers log every non-resident interaction with time, plate, description, and outcome — and residents get a posted-notice deterrent effect the second week after a program starts.

02

Package & porch theft

Porch theft is the single most-common HOA complaint we see, and it's concentrated between 1 PM and 7 PM weekdays. Randomized daylight passes on porch-theft-prone streets cut reported incidents by roughly 60% inside 90 days — we pull the exact before/after from the community’s own report data for your quarterly board packet.

03

Suspicious vehicles

The unmarked van parked on the cul-de-sac. The car with out-of-state plates idling three nights running. Officers photograph, log, run plate through the dispatch portal, and — where justified — approach. Every log entry goes to the resident portal and the monthly HOA board report.

04

After-party & STR issues

Airbnb bachelor parties. Teen gatherings when parents are out of town. Pool-after-hours violations. Our officers document noise, vehicle count, violation start-time, and end-time — the board uses the log for its own enforcement path through the association attorney. We document; we don’t adjudicate.

02 / The Program

Six steps
from intake
to patrol.

New residential programs stand up in roughly fourteen business days from signed contract to first patrol. The sequence below is the same whether the account is a sixty-home cul-de-sac or an eight-hundred-door gated community — we scale the officers, not the process.

Step 01Week 1

Intake with the board

Ninety-minute session with the board’s security committee, CAM manager, and — where it exists — the outgoing vendor. We pull the last six months of incident logs, governing-document excerpts, and map the community’s actual call-volume pattern before we quote.

Board chair · CAM · walk-through
Step 02Week 1–2

Officer assignment

One named primary officer, one named secondary, one regional float — all W-2, all TN or MS licensed. The board meets the primary before the program launches. Residents see the same three faces instead of a rotation of strangers in marked vehicles.

Named primary · photo · bio
Step 03Week 2

Resident portal

Every resident gets access to a white-labeled ByDuty resident app — submit a concern, review the last 30 days of patrol activity on their street, see recent incident summaries, and request a welfare check on a neighbor’s home during travel. The portal is optional for residents, never mandatory.

ByDuty · resident app · opt-in
Step 04Ongoing

Incident escalation

Every incident is triaged on a four-tier ladder — log, notify board, notify law enforcement, stand-fast on-scene. The board sets the escalation threshold for each tier in the intake document; the officer and dispatch follow it to the letter. No ad-hoc judgement calls on what gets escalated.

4-tier ladder · board-defined
Step 05Monthly

Monthly board report

A bound, exhibit-ready report goes to the board president and CAM manager on the 5th of each month — total patrol hours, randomization heatmap, every logged incident with photos, STR activity, and a trend commentary written by the account supervisor. Ready to drop into a board packet without editing.

5th of month · PDF + printed
Step 06Quarterly

Contract review cadence

The account supervisor attends one board meeting per quarter, walks the community’s incident trends, takes scope-adjustment requests from the board, and brings a written recommendation for the next quarter. We earn the renewal four times a year, not once.

In-person · quarterly
03 / For Boards & Managers

Built for
the way HOAs
actually work.

HOA security is a governance question before it’s a security question. Below is how we structure the contract, the insurance, the indemnity, and the day-to-day relationship so the board can defend the decision to residents — and sleep at night when an incident happens.

Contract structure

Twelve-month term, signed by the HOA president on association letterhead, with a thirty-day exit after month six at the board’s sole discretion. Invoicing is monthly in arrears, payable to Shield of Steel LLC, and the full line-item detail breaks down to per-door cost for any resident who wants to see it. No auto-renewal without board resolution.

We do not require the HOA to pay a surcharge for short-notice scope changes inside the 12-month window — pull back to three passes per night after a quiet quarter, add a second vehicle for a festival weekend, we re-ratio within the contract.

Insurance + indemnification

The HOA is named as additional insured on our $5M GL general liability policy for the duration of the contract, with a current certificate of insurance delivered on contract signing and refreshed every policy year. Our E&O policy carries an additional $2M tower. The HOA indemnifies us for board-directed actions; we indemnify the HOA for officer conduct. Standard commercial terms, no surprises.

Board-meeting attendance

The account supervisor attends one regular board meeting per quarter at no additional charge. Additional meeting attendance — annual meeting, emergency session, resident open forum — is billed at $185/hr with a one-hour minimum, or bundled into the quarterly cost at contract signing if the board expects ongoing involvement.

Officer-per-door ratios

  • Standard nightly1 patrol officer per ~150 doors · 4–6 randomized passes between 10 PM and 5 AM
  • Heavy nightly1 patrol officer per ~90 doors · 6–10 passes · adds daylight sweep
  • Gated / staffed1 officer continuous at gatehouse · 1 interior-rover per ~300 doors
  • Festival / incidentScales up on 48-hour notice · no minimum-commitment uplift
Active residential programs
Germantown, TN Collierville, TN Cordova, TN Bartlett, TN Brentwood, TN Franklin, TN Signal Mountain, TN Farragut, TN Olive Branch, MS Hernando, MS
04 / Residential FAQ

Residential Security
FAQ.

The eight questions that come up every time we sit down with an HOA board or property-management company for the first time. Answered directly, with real specifics — not marketing copy.

Q · 01 Do you work with HOAs?
Yes. HOAs and neighborhood associations are roughly a third of our residential book. We contract directly with the board — the signatory is the association, not any individual resident — and we work inside your governing documents, not around them. Current HOA clients include communities in Germantown, Collierville, Cordova, Brentwood, and Signal Mountain, ranging from 40-door cul-de-sacs up to 820-door master-planned communities.
Q · 02 Can we split the cost across residents?
The contract is between the HOA and Shield of Steel. How the HOA funds the contract — annual assessment increase, dedicated security line item, optional opt-in surcharge, reserve allocation — is up to the board and your governing documents. We’ll happily provide a per-door cost breakdown for your board packet so residents see what the nightly patrol actually costs them individually, typically $8 to $22 per door per month depending on cadence and door ratio.
Q · 03 What if a resident complains about an officer?
Every resident complaint gets a written response from the account supervisor within 24 hours, with a copy to the HOA board president and — if you have one — your CAM manager. Body-cam and GPS review happens automatically for any interaction-related complaint. If a resident and an officer genuinely don’t fit, we reassign the primary — no arguments, no billing disruption. Persistent complaints against the same officer trigger an internal review under our use-of-force and conduct policies.
Q · 04 Do you handle short-term-rental issues (Airbnb)?
Yes, and it’s one of the fastest-growing parts of the residential book. If your HOA prohibits or regulates short-term rentals, officers log every suspected STR on a dedicated exhibit — vehicle counts, check-in activity, noise violations, parking violations, pool-after-hours issues — and deliver a monthly STR summary to the board. We don’t enforce the rule directly; your management company or association attorney does. What we build is the documentation trail the attorney needs to act on a violation without a proof problem.
Q · 05 Will officers stop non-residents?
In gated communities with staffed entry, yes — officers control access per the HOA’s credentialing list and can turn away anyone who isn’t on it. In open neighborhoods, officers can approach and engage any person on HOA common property, but they cannot detain a non-resident absent a specific articulable cause. We operate exactly inside Tennessee and Mississippi trespass and citizen-encounter law, and every officer is trained on the specific line between a lawful approach, a lawful citizen’s arrest, and an unlawful detention. We never, ever blur that line to look more aggressive in a board meeting.
Q · 06 Do you enforce HOA rules?
We document, not enforce. Officers log rule violations — parking, trash day, noise, unauthorized contractor work, pool-hour breaches, holiday decoration cutoff — with photos and timestamps, and the board uses that log for its own enforcement process through the management company or association attorney. Asking security officers to personally issue violations or cite residents directly exposes the HOA to a defamation and selective-enforcement liability we will not put the board in. Our documentation gives your enforcement process the evidentiary foundation it needs without that exposure.
Q · 07 How often do you patrol at night?
Standard residential programs run four to eight randomized passes between 10 PM and 5 AM, delivered from a marked SUV with GPS tracking. Gated communities with staffed entry get continuous coverage through the gatehouse plus a scheduled interior rover. Randomization is algorithmic — same quantity of passes every week, never the same timing — so patterns can’t be figured out by someone watching the neighborhood from the outside for a few nights. The monthly board report includes a randomization heatmap so you can audit the spread yourself.
Q · 08 What’s the contract minimum?
Twelve months is our standard term with a thirty-day exit clause available to the board after month six if the quarterly review shows the program isn’t delivering. The minimum weekly spend for a neighborhood program is $285 per week — roughly $14,800 annually — which buys five randomized nightly passes, the resident portal, the monthly board report, and quarterly board-meeting attendance by the account supervisor. Larger communities or higher-cadence programs scale from there based on door count and board expectations.
05 / Next Step

Walk the community.
Get the plan.

An account supervisor will walk your neighborhood with the board’s security committee, review the last six months of incident reports, attend one board meeting, and deliver a written program recommendation inside fourteen business days. No retainer, no pitch, no obligation — just the document you can put in front of your residents.